Sharing the Walk--January 30, 2023

Sharing the Walk--January 30, 2023

"He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" [Micah 6:8]

There doesn't need to be drama between us and God.  If we find there is drama in that relationship, you can be sure that we're the ones who have added it.

This is one of the things I love about this well-known verse from Micah, a verse many of us heard this past Sunday in worship as part of our first reading. Micah cuts through our melodrama and calls our bluff when we are getting all worked up about what God wants, and he just says, "It's never been complicated, and God is not trying to make things difficult."  God isn't looking for us to prove our worthiness or achieve our way into some saintly status. God has never been holding auditions or try-outs--God has only ever invited us to share the road as we walk together.

What's hard for us, of course, is that so often we want to make a big production out of our faith and make it a quest... a burden... a crusade.  That allows us to see ourselves as heroic, rather than as humble, and quite frankly, our egos need to be stroked.  If we can tell ourselves that we've endured fierce persecution, or sacrificed life and limb in the name of God, or left some monumental legacy to the impact we've made for our faith, then we can tell ourselves we've "earned" a place in heaven.  But to hear that God has simply called us to walk in God's own ways of justice and mercy, well, we can't pretend we're "heroes" when we are doing that.  We have to see ourselves as children being invited on a walk with a parent, as recipients of grace.

I think of that story in the book of Kings about the Syrian general Naaman who goes to see the prophet Elisha looking for a dramatic and spectacular show of power to heal his leprosy, only to be told to go wash in the Jordan River seven times.  And at first, he gets mad that Elisha won't come out and wave his hands over him to make him well, until a servant points out to him that if he had been told to do some big and daring quest to be healed, he would have done it--so why not do this small and easy thing?  And of course, that's just it--some part of Naaman wants to have to "do" something big to be healed.  His ego needs a "quest" or an epic battle or a perilous journey or something like the Twelve Labors of Hercules to let him believe he's earning the help he is seeking.  He wants to be able to boast, if to nobody else other than himself, that he's "won" the favor of God.  In the end, what it takes for Naaman to be healed is for him to let go of that need to be heroic, and instead to let a humble dip in an unimpressive river be the means of his healing.

Micah seems to be telling the same to the people in his day, and in ours.  To be drawn into relationship with God is to be pulled into love, and love doesn't need to perform for the beloved--love just seeks to walk together.  There's no need for putting on a show; God just calls us to share the path.  It's like the difference between all those overly dramatic love songs, proudly insisting that the singer would climb the highest mountain or swim the deepest ocean for the beloved, and what actual love looks like--that is more likely to actually just want to wash the dishes together or fold the laundry side by side.  God has never needed us to "prove" our devotion or commitment with some hero's quest; God has simply invited us to walk along the same way.

Today, then, part of learning both how to love God, and to let ourselves be loved by God, is to learn to let go of that need for dramatic shows of piety, and instead to see the ordinary as the place we relate to God, and grace as the currency of that relationship.  God was never looking for us to prove ourselves; God has only been calling us to walk together.  Realizing that means we are finally free to abandon our pretense, our posturing, and our boasting, so that we can just enjoy the walk.

O God, enable us to walk humbly with you today, and always.